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Kreolk wakes not often: only when the Sister Moons align, and the tide hushes, and the quiet becomes an invitation. His burrow will have filled with mud while he slept, and he will have to dig himself out.

Once, on reaching the beach, he found many strange creatures there, living in odd structures that had no smell. The creatures were clearly intelligent, like Kreolk was, but they would not communicate: instead they attacked him with hundreds of tiny pin-prick wounds. He had no choice but to crush them and their tiny buildings.

Doctor Kind found himself in 1986, before all the changes, before the machine had even started working. He knew where to go, where to look. It was the Reagan years, so buying a gun was easy.

The grad student Kind used to like to go to this particular coffee house; Emily worked there then. This was before he had gotten up the nerve to ask her out. That’s where he found the his younger self, and that’s where he now pulled out the gun and shot him in the head.

He invented this thing, it’s basically a giant pair of hedge-clippers. Heavy as shit: use it alone you get tired out real quick, so mostly we work in teams of two. One guy gets the zombie’s attention, second guy comes up behind, rests the blades on the zombie’s shoulders, and then squeezes. Cuts right through bone no problem. The head comes off, and no more zombie. Then you switch so the first cutter can rest his arms.

We put the heads on poles outside of town. It don’t scare the zombies off, but it’s funny.

The lawn was starting to get to him. The ground floor was boarded up, of course, but he could see out the upstairs windows. The tall fescue had gotten to waist-height, and had gone to seed. The ride-on mower was parked right where he’d left it idling three weeks ago: having long ago run out of gas, sputtered, and died.

He had to do something about the situation. If he only had a reel mower he could go out even now and cut the grass: there weren’t any zombies around, no loud noise to attract them. He’d be perfectly safe.